Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-669899f699-8p65j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-05-02T00:03:15.746Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - The power of right(s): tracking empires of law and new modes of social resistance in Bolivia (and elsewhere)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2011

By
Mark Goodale
Edited by
Mark Goodale  and
Sally Engle Merry
Mark Goodale
Affiliation:
George Mason University
Mark Goodale
Affiliation:
George Mason University, Virginia
Sally Engle Merry
Affiliation:
New York University
Get access

Summary

INTRODUCTION

At the end of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's dizzyingly suggestive but frustratingly vague book Empire, the authors take the leap that we all know is coming, but which, given the heights that have come before, we anticipate with a certain amount of dread. After having described what they understand to be a new global socio-political configuration, and having shrouded their analysis in a kind of ominousness, given the fact that Empire emerges through the self-disciplining of millions of individuals around the world, outside of the traditional institutions that can be resisted or even appropriated, they nevertheless go on to predict a revolution by the “multitude” against Empire. It is not the neo-Marxist epistemology that is so unsatisfying about this abrupt end to what is surely one of the most innovatively forethinking works of critical scholarship in recent years, one perfectly and organically embedded in its times. And nor must we necessarily object to the way in which its neo-Marxist social analysis reflects a peculiar transformation since 1989, in which the scientific trappings of dialectical materialism have been replaced by a giddy mysticism, so that the fall of the Soviet system should no longer dampen the “irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist” (2000: 413). Rather, the disappointment with their invocation of revolution is two-fold. First, it is entirely prefigured, rather than established; as I said, we know a prediction of massive system disrupture is coming because we know the theoretical trajectory in which the analysis of Empire is located.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Practice of Human Rights
Tracking Law between the Global and the Local
 , pp. 130 - 162
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Baxi, Upendra. 2002. The Future of Human Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Berlin, Isaiah. 1997. The Proper Study of Mankind. Edited by Hardy, Henry, and Hausheer, Roger. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, p. 119.Google Scholar
Cueto, Marcus, ed. 1994. Missionaries of Science: The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Cueto, Marcus. 1995. Saberes andinos: ciencia y tecnologia en Bolivia, Ecuador y Peru. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.Google Scholar
Donnelly, Jack. 2003. Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Goldstein, Daniel. 2004. The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia. Durham: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodale, Mark. 2001. “A Complex Legal Universe in Motion: Rights, Obligations, and Rural-Legal Intellectuality in the Bolivian Andes.” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Goodale, Mark. 2002. “Legal Ethnography in an Era of Globalization: The Arrival of Western Human Rights Discourse to Rural Bolivia.” In Starr, June and Goodale, Mark, eds. Practicing Ethnography in Law: New Dialogues, Enduring Methods. New York: Palgrave/St. Martin's Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodale, Mark. 2005. “Empires of Law: Discipline and Resistance within the Transnational System.” Social and Legal Studies 14(4): 553–583.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodale, Mark. 2006. “Ethical Theory as Social Practice.” American Anthropologist 108(1): 25–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodale, Mark. 2008. Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism (forthcoming).
Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hernández-Truyol, Berta E., ed. 2002. Moral Imperialism: A Critical Anthology. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Keck, Margaret, and Sikkink, Kathryn, eds. 1998. Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Klein, Herbert S. 1982. Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Society. (Revised and reissued in 2003 as A Concise History of Bolivia.) Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Klug, Heinz. 2000. Constituting Democracy: Law, Globalism and South Africa's Political Reconstruction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Korey, William. 1998. NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A Curious Grapevine. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Lowrey, Kathleen. 2003. “Enchanted Ecology: Magic, Science, and Nature in the Bolivian Chaco.” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago.
Merry, Sally. 2005. Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merry, Sally. 2006. “Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle.” American Anthropologist 108(1): 38–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nader, Laura. 1997. “Controlling Processes: Tracing the Dynamic Components of Power.” Current Anthropology 38: 711–737.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nader, Laura. 1999. “In a Women's Looking Glass: Normative Blindness and Unresolved Human Rights Issues.” Horizontes Antropológicos (5)10: 61–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nash, June. 1993. We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Platt, Tristan. 1982. Estado Boliviano y Ayllu Andino: Tierra y Tributo en el Norte de Potosí. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.Google Scholar
Reinaga, Fausto. 1969. La Revolución India. La Paz: Ediciones PIB (Partido Indio de Bolivia).Google Scholar
Riles, Annelise. 2000. The Network Inside Out. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Riles, Annelise. 2006. “Skepticism, Intimacy and the Ethnographic Subject: Human Rights as Legal Knowledge.” American Anthropologist 108(1): 52–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. 1991. Liberal Democracy and Ayllu Democracy in Bolivia: The Case of Northern Potosí. Journal of Development Studies 26(4): 97–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Santos, Boaventura de S. 1995. Toward a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Schultz, Jim. 2004. “Another Water Revolt Begins in Bolivia.” Democracy Center on-line, December 18, 2004. Available on-line at www.cedib.org/accionandina/?module=displaystory&story_id=12984&format=print. Accessed February 7, 2007.
Speed, Shannon, and María Teresa Sierra (eds.). 2005. “Critical Perspectives on Human Rights and Multiculturalism in Neoliberal Latin America.” Theme issue of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 28(1).
Turner, Terrence. 1997. “Human Rights, Human Difference: Anthropology's Contribution to an Emancipatory Cultural Politics.” Journal of Anthropological Research (53)3: 273–291.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cott, Donna Lee. 2000. The Friendly Liquidation of the Past: The Politics of Diversity in Latin America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, Richard. 2001. The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×